Liftoff in Coalwood

By James R. Gaines

Published: October 18, 1998

ROCKET BOYS

A Memoir.

By Homer H. Hickam Jr.

368 pp. New York:

Delacorte Press. $23.95.

In autobiography as in life, so much depends on how we understand what happened to us. The facts are secondary, sometimes even misleading: a benign world may signal alienation to a neurotic, just as a harsh world may give the sanguine person a sense of triumph. Interpretation is almost everything, which helps explain wildly divergent siblings (the Unabomber and his social-worker brother) and how the sexually abused child of a teen-age welfare mother can become a worldbeater (Oprah Winfrey). So much depends on how we tell ourselves the story of our lives, in dreams and daydreams.

Homer H. Hickam Jr. might have followed his father into the coal mines of Appalachia. Happily for him, he is a very adept storyteller. ''Rocket Boys'' is his story of growing up in Coalwood, W.Va., at a time in America (1957 to 1960) when all telephones were black, all bathtubs white and very little was gray: when the world was Ike versus Khrushchev and the theater of the cold war was moving into outer space.

Coalwood was a company town in the original sense; the company owned everything in it, and its anthem was Tennessee Ernie Ford's rendition of a popular dirge, ''Sixteen Tons'' (''St. Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go / I owe my soul to the company store''). Coalwood had no widows to remind it of the constant threat of explosions and cave-ins; the company made them move out of their company-owned homes.

Homer Hickam Sr. was the boss of the mine, so the author grew up in its dust: ''Throughout my childhood, when I raised my blanket in the morning, I saw a black, sparkling powder float off it. My socks were always black with coal dirt when I took off my shoes at night.'' Life in the Hickam household, at least for Homer Jr., shared Coalwood's desolation. His workaholic father, wracked by coughing fits from the black lung disease that would eventually kill him, was mostly absent, and his mother, who hated everything about the town and the mine, escaped into the mural of a seashore scene that she painted ceaselessly on a kitchen wall.

The author was too slight for football and half blind, and his older brother, Jim, was a star of the high school team, in a town where all that mattered besides coal was football. ''I was watching television in the living room one night,'' he writes, ''when Mom suggested to Dad, after he had spent some minutes . . . boasting about Jim to one of his foremen, that it might be a good thing if he bragged on me every once in a while. Even though he knew I was in the same room, Dad thought for a moment and then wondered aloud, quite honestly, 'What about?' '' Mrs. Hickam wanted only that her second son not follow other Coalwood boys into the mines. When his grandfather remarked one day that he, at 3, was ''just like Homer'' Sr., his mother ''carried me out onto the front porch, stroking my hair. . . . 'No, you're not,' she crooned just loud enough so only she and I could hear. 'No, you're not.' ''

Everything changed when he was 14; on Oct. 5, 1957, Russia beat America into space with Sputnik. He and his mother inferred his future from that seismic event: he would build a rocket! Lots of American boys got rocket-minded after Sputnik, but for the Hickams it was more than a phase. For his mother, the idea represented a way to prove to his father that Homer Jr., an indifferent student, had the aptitude for college. For him, standing vigil in his yard at night for a glimpse of Sputnik, it was a connection to the larger world. ''All my life, everything important that had ever happened had always happened somewhere else. But Sputnik was right there in front of my eyes in my backyard. . . . I felt that if I stretched out enough, I could touch it.''

Thus was born the Big Creek Missile Agency (B.C.M.A.), named for his high school, manned by his pals, led by Homer Hickam Jr. and dedicated to the proposition that Coalwood boys could do anything, including helping America play catch-up to the Commies. He credits his mother with pushing him on, but his father, while publicly berating him for foolishness and theft of company property to build his rockets, eventually conspired to get him everything he needed, without acknowledging to his son that he was doing so. Both parents showed forbearance as the B.C.M.A.'s early experiments made scrap of the Hickam fence, toaster, bathroom scale and water heater. But in time Homer vindicated his mother's belief in him, managing to teach himself trigonometry and calculus, as well as how to machine-tool a rocket nozzle that would draw the praise of his greatest hero, Wernher von Braun.

The ''rocket boys'' of Coalwood named their missiles for an extinct, flightless bird, the auk. Their humility stopped there. As they progressed from their first vehicle, a flashlight body filled with cherry-bomb powder, through Auk XXV, a zinc-and-sulfur-powered five-foot rocket that reached 15,000 feet, the last in a series that won the local, county and, unthinkably, the 1960 National Science Fair, their audacious flights inspired a dying region's imagination and hope, and a pride that even Hickam's father could not contain. On the day the boys shot off their last series of rockets, Homer Hickam Sr. showed up at ''Cape Coalwood'' for the first time. The author asked his father to turn the ignition switch for the final launch: ''Auk XXXI erupted, blowing huge chunks of concrete loose from the pad. The crowd took a step backward, and some of them started to run. Auk XXXI seemed to split the air that filled the narrow valley, a shock wave rippling across the slack. Women screamed and men clapped their hands to their ears . . . mouths agape, eyes wide, their cheers stuck in their throats. . . . I became aware of movement beside me, and I was astonished to see Dad prancing along the slack, waving his old hat in his hand. He was exulting to the sky. 'Beautiful! Beautiful!' ''

As might be expected of a book that is ''soon to be a major motion picture,'' the story is too perfect: 30-year-old dialogue is reproduced verbatim, the plot is a stacked deck, the victory seems pat (the teen-age protagonist even tells the Presidential candidate John F. Kennedy that he should aim America's space program at the moon, a moment so farfetched it must be true). Hickam admits taking ''certain liberties'' in telling it. But whatever its flaws, it's a good bet this is the story as he told it to himself. It is a lovely one, and in the career of Homer H. Hickam Jr., who prevailed over the facts of his life to become a NASA engineer training astronauts for space walks, that made all the difference.

James R. Gaines, former editor of Time, Life and People magazines and now the editor of Travel & Leisure Golf magazine, is compiling an anthology of the literature of aviation.